Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone, and once again, welcome to another live this morning and hope you're having a wonderful start to your day. And we sure appreciate you guys coming on and thanks for that. And let me get to another question that I got. Okay? And I said, okay, let me just break that down a little bit more. Okay. I think it was Susie asking me this question. Dr. Martin, why do you say all the time that sugar is so toxic for heart disease? It ain't fat, it ain't cholesterol. Okay, it's sugar. Sugar is very destructive. And I just want to double down on that. Look a couple of things right out of the gate that you'll get. Your body knows that sugar is toxic. Your body knows that. Okay? Sugar left unattended in the bloodstream is very, very toxic. Your body understands that. Your body manages that.
You have an organ dedicated to that called your pancreas. It is dedicated to regulating blood sugar, okay? Dedicated to it. We've written this in emails and we talk about this all the time. Empty out your four to five liters of blood at any given time, and you'll be lucky to find a half a teaspoon of sugar in your bloodstream. If you had 20 donuts and I've told you a hundred times, don't do it, but it's been done, don't you do it. But if you had 20 donuts and you weren't a diabetic, your blood sugar would skyrocket, but then it would come back down into normal limits pretty quick. Why? Because you have an organ dedicated to keeping your blood sugar low. You don't want to go too low, but I mean very low. So your body's dedicated to it. So let me give you an example.
Why do people, when they are in a pre-diabetic state, they're thirsty all the time. They get polyuria, they're going to the bathroom all the time. What's the body trying to do? If your sugars are high, what is your body trying to do? Pee it out. Polyuria, poly dips. You okay? You're hungry. Your body is trying to regulate blood sugar. Okay? Water. You need water. Polydipsia, polyphagia. Okay, what is your body trying to do? Well, your body said, give me more water. Give me more water. Give me more water. Why? To dilute the sugar. That's why. So your body's dedicated to that, guys, and isn't it funny? Well, it's not really that funny, but it's amazing really that here we are in 2024 at the end of it. And the word out there to eat is moderation.
It is not really the way to eat moderation that comes to you from the food industry. You can drink coke in moderation. Not really. Okay. Anyway, back to the subject. The subject is why is sugar so toxic to your heart? Why? Okay, well, let's go over it. Okay. First thing is sugar left unattended will destroy. What's the first thing that it destroys? What does sugar destroy? Left unattended in your bloodstream. Blood vessels starts with those little capillaries, and sugar will destroy your eyes. It'll destroy a lot of things, but your eyes, it's all little blood vessels in the back of your eyes and very destructive to that sugar. Ask a diabetic now, why is it so destructive to your heart? Let's go over. So the first one is, it destroys capillaries and then eventually will destroy your blood vessels. Again. Ask a diabetic, why is a diabetic 50% more likely to have a heart attack than the general population?
There's a reason for it. Sugar left unattended. And guys, look, Metformin, the go-to drug for diabetics and wonderful drug, it works until it doesn't. Someone that's a diabetic, and I've said this for 50 years, it will always end poorly. Diabetes ends poorly if you're diabetic and you don't get it under control. And even with medication, medication, they sort of have a shelf life and after a while don't work anymore. And you need more and more and you don't control. Okay? Why is sugar so toxic? Okay, it destroys, number one, destroys blood vessels. Got it? Okay. Heart can be your limbs, can be your eyes, can be a lot of things too. But think of that. I mean your heart. It's the pump. It gets affected, okay? When you eat sugar over a period of time, okay? And foods that turn to sugar rapidly, okay? Why is that so destructive for the heart?
Why? You develop a condition called insulin resistance. That is when your cells, your little cells, muscle cells, heart cells, liver cells, they go, sugar, I'm so sick of you. And insulin that comes knocking at the cell's door all the time. And, hello, I'm your pesky neighbor. Well, why are you coming all the time? Well, you insist on eating crappy carbohydrates and sugars. Therefore, I have no choice but to come to your door. I'm going to knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. You got to let the sugar in. I can't leave it. Okay? If insulin could talk, here's what it would say. I can't leave sugar unattended in the bloodstream. I must put it inside your cell wall. Hello? Okay, and what happens period of time. Passes not that long, but a period of time passes and your cells resist insulin. It makes it harder for insulin to, it's like, guys, you have a key to a lock and you go in, open the door, okay?
But eventually the lock doesn't work as well. It gets jammed and you're turning the key, but the door doesn't want to open, not easily. And that's guys is insulin resistance. You got it? And when you create insulin resistance, here's what happens. Why is it so detrimental to your heart? Well, okay, you get metabolic syndrome and metabolic syndrome. Why is that so bad on your heart? Well, in metabolic syndrome, you have high triglycerides, fat balls. Tg, when you look at your blood test, guys, okay? Get my book. Sun Steak and Steel. You see it behind me there. Sun, steak and steel. I talk about this. Triglycerides, fat balls three triglyceride, three fat balls don't come from fat, they come from sugar. When you have insulin resistance, your triglycerides go up and your protective HDL, your cholesterol goes down. That's protective to your heart. HDL is your heart's friend.
Why? Because HDL is the Amazon trucks, the FedEx trucks, the Canada Post trucks that are back on the highway today, I hope the US Postal Service trucks, what do they do? They go and hitch their wagons to the triglycerides before you damage your heart, fat balls will clog up your arteries unless you have enough cholesterol, HDL especially to go get them and bring them back to the liver for processing. Guys, why are triglycerides so bad for your heart? They clog not cholesterol. Cholesterol is your friend. So when you get insulin resistance, your body makes more triglycerides and you make less HDL. There's less trucks on the highways and byways of your blood vessels, okay? So sugar left unattended destroys blood vessels. Two, you develop a metabolic condition called metabolic syndrome. High triglycerides, low HDL belly fat, elevated blood pressure. Well, that's bad. Yeah, that's bad for your heart.
Makes your heart work harder, right? We all agree with that. See what sugar does. Okay? See what sugar does. And here's another reason, okay? Fatty liver, what? What's my liver got to do with my heart? Well, when your liver replaces liver cells with fat cells, okay, again, what do you get? Elevated? Triglycerides. Low HDL from the liver. What? Yeah, you're replacing sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup fills the liver with fat because your sugar is stored as glycogen fat. And that's all right. A little bit. Your body is unbelievable, but you miss out. Now on that protective HDLI hate when you lower cholesterol, I hate it. It has nothing to do with heart disease anyway. Okay? One destruction of blood vessels. Two, insulin resistance. 93% of the population, 93%. Unbelievable. Okay, three. Inflammation and oxidation. Sugar creates inflammation. Well, inflammation ain't Houdini, okay? You just don't get inflammation for no reason.
You get inflammation when sugar is in the blood vessels and it can't be taken out enough. And you get insulin resistance. And the cells at the cellular level, they're saying, insulin, I'm sick and tired of you. But that creates an inflammatory response. And sugar, by the way, is very, very destructive on its own because sugar, like I said, but how does it destroy blood vessels? By creating free radicals, oxidative damage. And if you don't believe that, think about this. Okay? How do you measure A1C? What is A1C? Well over three or four months, you measure sugar in the bloodstream. It's an average. How does it do that? Well, you check out the red blood cells and you can measure it. They're called glycated hemoglobin. What is that? Well, that's the middle of a red blood cell where you have hemoglobin, hemoglobin attaches to oxygen. That's why red blood cells are so important.
Red blood cells carry oxygen in the middle of them is hemoglobin, which every time you breathe, your red blood cells go by your lungs and they pick up oxygen. And how do they do that? Well, it's hemoglobin. It's like Velcro. It attaches to oxygen. Okay, well that gets glycated. What? It glycinates the red blood cell. Yeah, but it glycations everything else in your body too. Sugar glycations, it oxidizes, it destroys. It's a double whammo because you create free radicals, oxidative, rusting out of the body rapidly plus inflammation. They're like a double-edged sword. And inflammation. Again, left unattended will destroy your blood vessels. You get more cytokines and you get all these healing inflammation. Your body, it's without a fever, inflammation's on your side if you've got a bug, but not if it stays there. Now it destroys. Got it. So you have oxidation inflammation, you have insulin resistance, you have blood vessels being destroyed.
You have liver fatty liver. Fatty liver produces triglycerides and lowers your HDL. Okay? And another factor is uric acid. I talk about this a lot. You know what a uric acid, by the way, everybody makes uric acid, okay? But when you have high uric acid levels, everybody makes it, and it's only a matter whether your body clears it or not, but if your body through your kidneys don't clear it enough, uric acid will elevate your blood pressure. You know why? Because it lowers nitric oxide. You know what nitric oxide is? Think of nitroglycerin an explosion at the blood vessel level. You want that because it opens up the blood vessel, it relaxes the blood vessel. So when you have high levels of uric acid and people think gout, but only a small percentage of people with high uric acid get gout. So unless you get gout, they don't even measure it.
Most doctors don't measure uric acid unless they're suspicious of gout. But this is problems without gout. Why? It lowers your nitric oxide. When I was in school in the seventies, we didn't even know nitric oxide existed. I mean, I never heard of nitric. Now, I heard a nitroglycerin. You learn that in school. What is nitroglycerin? Oh, they give that for angina, right? In those days, in the seventies, they gave you a dissolvable pill under your tongue if you had angina and it would relieve angina. Nitroglycerin. They gave you nitroglycerin and they didn't exactly know why it worked. They just knew it worked. But in 1980, in the eighties, they won a Nobel Prize in medicine. They discovered we had a molecule in our body called nitric oxide. I remember reading that. What? We have a molecule in our body called nitric oxide. Well, if you've got high levels of uric acid, your nitric oxide goes down.
If your nitric oxide goes down, your blood vessels will not open properly. You're going to get high blood. Look, guys, after the age of 60, this is, I think it's 60 or 65, I'd have to look it up again. Do you know that half the population are on blood pressure pills? And they don't talk about nitric oxide. They all they want to do is give you a pill with enormous amount of side effects. Now, I'm not telling you to stop taking it. Don't go tell the world. Dr. Martin said, don't take high blood pressure pills. I never said that. I'm telling you how you get heart disease from sugar. Okay? You got the memo, guys. That's why it's so important. Did you see our newsletter today? Our email newsletter? And guys, you can sign up for this. Okay? We're going to do the reset in January.
Good time to do it, right? Everybody's thinking about dieting in January, but this is not dieting. This is because you're not counting calories or whatever. You're just changing fuel. You're going to go to eggs, meat, and cheese for 30 days and watch what happens. And we're going to give you a prize, okay? Soon as I get a picture of that poker chip, commemorative poker chip, supposed to be very, very nice. Okay? Anyway, guys, isn't it important to talk about food? Eh, isn't it? Not all the answers are in food, not all the answers, but most of them are. If somebody put this out as an expression, I loved it. When you look at the four horsemen of chronic disease, okay? Isn't that what Kennedy is supposed to be tackling? Right? I'm not getting political, I'm just telling you that one thing he does say, and I agree, a million percent in North America we're pretty sick.
And the biggest reason for it, the four horsemen of chronic disease, heart disease, worse than ever, cancer, worse than ever, Alzheimer's, worse than ever. Diabetes a hundred times worse than ever. What was it in the 1950s when I was a little boy, 1% of the population, my grandfather had it. Okay, I've got bad genetics for diabetes, but diabetes, genetics, diabetes is lifestyle. The four horsemen of the apocalypse of chronic disease, metabolic syndrome, it's the way the body uses energy. And what the reset is, it's a change of energy. It's a change of fuel. It's a change. At the A TP, it's the change of the mitochondria. If you give your mitochondria your battery packs a better fuel, amazing. What happens. Okay? You want to use it as a diet, okay? It's the best, but it's for your metabolic health long-term, from your brain to your toes and your heart, your heart, heart disease, the number one killer in our society today.
Okay? You got the memo. Okay. See, you got to break things down to say, well, why is sugar so toxic? Okay? Why is it so toxic? And you go, okay, I get it. Okay, guys, we love you guys dearly and sincerely, okay? And got lots. I got lots of research here. And man, oh man, okay. I just answered another question. Why is sugar so toxic to the heart? Okay, guys, we love you. We'll talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!